


Sometimes a name is only a name.

by Cuits



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Gen, Ghouli spoilers, Implied Fox Mulder/Dana Scully, Season/Series 11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-13 15:25:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13573425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cuits/pseuds/Cuits
Summary: Jackson is on the run but it is not the end, it is a beginning.





	1. Chapter 1

Tricking people becomes as easy as breathing. He walks around under the pretense of being someone else all the time. Someone older, appropriate for that job he’s applying for to earn some money before moving to the next town, someone who won't raise suspicion.

 

The hard part is to not get lost into the trick.

 

He gets up and looks himself in the mirror and talks to himself briefly.

 

“You are Jackson Van de Kamp,” he says, and he repeats it twice, sometimes more.

 

It feels like no one else in the world knows that except the people who want to hunt him down. He takes the appearances of other guests and sneaks into unoccupied hotel rooms, like a ghost, only seen by himself and CCTV cameras. He once tricked a concierge into believing his library card was a credit card with funds, but he kept imagining the disapproving, disappointed look in his parents eyes so he hasn’t done it again.

 

Jackson never stays too long in one place and never uses his real name but whenever he arrives to a new place he goes to buy some daisies (mom’s favourites) and a second hand paperback cowboy novel (dad’s favourites) and leaves them at random tombstones in the local cemetery.

 

He cries. For them, for the loss of his family.

 

He cries a lot. He cries alone and in places where he doesn’t need to appear to be anyone else. He is alone. An orphan. He doesn’t even know how to begin to mourn them...

 

He is sixteen years old. His life wasn’t supposed to be like this.

 

Only…

 

Only deep down he knows his life was always supposed to be like this. He is just fulfilling a long old prophecy issued by a long forgotten oracle, and he only gets to know what it says as he lives to face its consequences. It’s so, so fucked up that sometimes it suffocates him at night.

 

It’s been six months and three states when he sees it in a gas station just outside Nashville: a postcard of a windmill with blades made of old CDs. He buys it on a whim but he doesn’t have any address to send it to.

 

He keeps it in his backpack nevertheless. It makes him feel marginally less alone.

 

A month later he meets a girl while working as a bartender in a hole in the wall in Paducah. She’s older than him but not overly so, he’s only appearing to be a guy in his twenties, but she asks him for his name and he suddenly freezes. He has given fake names a thousand times by now but somehow he refuses to give this girl with the greenest eyes and the prettiest smile he has ever seen, a name that’s not his own. He can’t give her his real name either so he gives her none.

 

He reaches to her that night, in dreams. He tries, he’s not sure how exactly this works because the times they have connected through dreams before have always been completely unintentional on his part.

 

He grabs the postal from his backpack, the edges are a little bent but he holds onto it for guidance and closes his eyes, tries to fall asleep thinking of her, of what he knows of her.

 

He walks into a room he doesn’t recognize, a kitchen with a big table. She’s standing with her back to him, her hair is shorter, brighter, redder.

 

When she turns around she also looks younger, not too young, but younger. She smiles at him with recognition but doesn’t take another step to approach him, and he is glad for it.

 

“What is the name you gave me?” he asks.

 

“William.”

 

“He thinks about it for half a seconds, rolls it around to get the feel of it. “William.”

 

It doesn’t feel familiar but he doesn’t hate it. He doesn’t see himself as a William but he doesn’t really see himself as any other name than his either. William is okay. Common enough. No, he doesn’t hate it.

 

He turns around to go but he doesn’t know where to go. He doesn’t control this dream, it’s like he is a guest here.

 

“Are you okay?”

 

Her voice is strong but kind. He likes it.

 

“I’m fine,” he answers with composure.

 

She sighs and her smile broadens.

 

He wakes up.

 

He finds another postal of a windmill in Lawrence, near Kansas City. He feels tempted to buy some sparkly red shoes and click the heels together. There is no place like home and all that shit. Maybe a tornado will take him away and bring him back to a life where his parents are still alive.

 

He buys this postcard too and remembers that someone called her “Scully” while he was lying on the floor being bagged. He gives it a chance and looks for her on the Internet, searches for a redheaded female FBI agent called Scully. It’s surprisingly easy to locate her, if you know where to look. There are a ton of blogs out there talking about weird shit that she has been involved with, like an investigation about a hundred cows suddenly dropping dead or chupacabra rumors. There are also a ton of scientific papers that could have been written by her, dealing with stuff no less weird than the blogs, including an invisible man and everything.

 

He doesn’t get an exact address but he sends the postcard to the X Files department in the FBI Edgar Hoover Building, Washington DC.

 

He doesn’t write anything else aside from where to send it to.

 

A week later he dreams with her, as in that they are both in the same dream. He’s not sure who has reached for whom this time but if it is an intrusion, it’s not unwelcome.

 

They are in a park, walking. It is sunny and warm and she looks older this time, but younger than when he saw her in person. Her hair is straighter, it reaches her shoulders and she smiles in a quiet, peaceful way.

 

“I walked you in this park when you were a baby,” she says.

 

He looks around, nothing seems familiar. His hands look small, like they did when he was eight or nine years old.

 

“I loved my parents,” he says, not entirely out of the blue. It seems important somehow that she understands this.

 

“I know.”

 

They keep walking in silence. It’s more comforting than he had previously thought it would be.

 

He turns seventeen. He has never been one to celebrate his birthday in a big fashion but his mother always made a cake and his father always ate half of it by himself. He misses them so, so much. 

 

He cuts his hair and grows some poor excuse of a beard and goes to visit Graceland once he reaches Memphis, God knows why, he has never been a fan of Elvis or anything.

 

All this moving around is starting to make him feel restless. He remembers when his family moved back when he was ten and it was such a big deal, now he just takes his backpack and drives away.

 

She whirls him in a nightmare, because there is no way this one is on him. Someone has been shot in the chest and she is trying to contain the blood coming out the chest but the thick blood leaks from between her fingers pooling on the floor. He approaches them but before he can have clear picture everything changes and this time she’s crying next to a coffin. He takes her hand and she looks at him with so much pain in her eyes that he wants to wake up. She starts to run so he runs after her. She shouts for someone but he doesn’t understand the words and then they are showered in white light and she’s dressed as a surgeon next to an operating table. On it, a little girl lies unmoving.

 

She looks at him but he can tell she is not really seeing him.

 

“I can’t lose you, too,” she says to whomever she is speaking to. Her voice breaks. His heart breaks a little too.

 

He looks like young Malcolm X for a while driving through Mississippi. Not only nobody picks up the resemblance but he is stopped by the police like a million times in two days. The amount of uneducated racism is so overwhelming that he drinks himself to a stupor one night.

 

He is not even sure he is dreaming this time. He is still in his cheap, technically unoccupied hotel room and everything is kind of spinning around him when she appears next to him out of thin air.

 

“Drink water,” she says. She seats on the side of his bed.

 

“I’m not thirsty.”

 

“It helps prevents dehydration from alcohol poisoning. Drink water. You’ll thank me in the morning.”

 

She is wearing a ponytail today. She looks very different with her hair up somehow.

 

“What are you, a doctor now?”

 

“I’ve been a doctor for quite some time now, actually.”

 

Now that he thinks about it all those scientific papers he read some time ago were signed by a Doctor D. Scully so it makes sense, he should have thought about that. 

 

She brushes the hair away from his sweaty forehead with cool, slender fingers.

 

“Can you do stuff too —  _ brain  _ stuff? Like I do?”

 

He asks because she never seems scared of the things he can do. His parents were terrified when he tried to begin to explain it to them and sent him to a psychiatrist, so there must be something there.

 

“No,” she says calmy. “But your father could, for a while.”

 

The next morning he wishes he had drunk like ten times more water because he feels like shit. His mouth tastes rotten and his head hurts with every little move. It’s fucking terrible. He stays in the room for two days straight drinking gatorade and watching bad TV.

 

Charlotte feels closer, although he doesn’t know to what. Like deja vu even though he has never been in Charlotte before. He doesn’t feel as lonely or as sad anymore, either.

 

He picks another postcard, not even a windmill, some generic nice landscape and sends it to the same address as before.

 

This time he writes. “I’m still here.” Not sure who he’s trying to convince or reassure of the fact.

 

Somehow it’s not strange that he doesn't know her full name yet, he has come to know other things about her, important stuff, like where she likes to go when she dreams of happy places, for instance.

 

He is a little surprised when he finds himself on a beach one night. It’s sunny and empty, and there is a sharp shaped UFO being washed away by the sea. She is not there, instead there is someone else but he can’t distinguish the figure, just the presence of someone being there resonating to him, like the feeling brought out by a familiar smell.

 

“I think I know who you are,” he says to the presence.

 

“Somedays I think I know who I am, too.”

 

The words don’t come to him like a real voice, more like floating concepts that reach his brain. He has no certainty if the presence is male or female but he makes the educated guess that this must be his biological father, whomever that might be.

 

“So you are here.”

 

The presence smiles, it feels to him like the presence smiles.

 

“I’ve always been here. Waiting.”

 

If you asked Jackson, this is not a bad place to wait. The sun, the sea, the weird UFO. It’s all weirdly peaceful, as if suspended in time and space, a parallel reality, a reality within a dream. Something.

 

“What have you been waiting for?”

 

“You. The end of the world. Either. Both.”

 

It all seems logical to him in a way that it is completely irrational. He tries not to think too hard about the implications of any of that.

 

“I like this place.”

 

“You can come whenever you need — whenever you want.”

 

He takes off his shoes and watches the waves until he wakes up.

 

He doesn’t dare to go back to Norfolk so he keeps driving and driving until he hits Atlantic City. 

 

Boy is that a mistake. 

 

The cassinos, the clubs, the night life… the city is full of security cameras and he cannot run from those. Before he can earn some extra cash to flee, they find him.

 

There are a couple of stern looking guys at the door of his hotel when he tries to go back to his room. He hides in plain sight in a coffee shop nearby and spots at least three dark, suspicious cars parked on the street. They’d have his car on the radar too, for sure, so he has almost no cash, his backpack and nothing else.

 

He is terrified, almost to the point of inaction. He is so scared that the fake image of himself starts to glitch so he makes a run for the bathroom and screams silently for help. He screams and screams and screams with his brain, and then tries to compose himself and goes back to his table to think of a plan and finish his coffee.

 

He takes out a notebook and a pen and starts to brainstorm his options. To everybody else he looks like a seventy year old doing a crossword.

 

He doesn’t think of anything when he hears the barista call the order for some “Bob” like four times in a row, but the next thing he knows is that somebody is sitting next to him in his booth.

 

He tries very, very hard not to panic. “What do you think you are doing, young man. This entire booth is taken. Have some respect for your elders,” he says with what he thinks is a convincing old man, grumpy thone.

 

He recognizes this man. It’s the man that was with her back in Northfolk, her law enforcement partner or something.

 

His heart skips a beat. This means she might be near, she might have heard him, she might be able to help him.

 

The man smiles a little knowing smile. “I think I know who you are,” he says, his own words thrown back at him make his breath catch in his throat.

 

“I don’t—”

 

“We met on a beach. Actually we met for the first time a long, long time before that.”

 

He doesn't know what to say. Across the street, a couple of guys that look like they could work for the WWE come out of a black sedan, like God, could they be any less conspicuous?

 

The man puts a hand on his forearm and he feels that sensation again, the one that comes from smelling something comforting and familiar.

 

“She’s in the back with the car ready,” he says in a low voice. Jackson hasn’t confirmed his identity yet but that doesn’t seem to slow him down even a little. “Her hair is rather easily to pick up from a distance.”

 

Jackson nods once. Puts his notebook back on his backpack and they both get up, go for the back door. They make a run for the car and as soon as they are both inside, before even the doors has closed completely she hits the speed pedal.

 

Jackson is too afraid to check if they are being followed at high speed. He drops his façade. He’s not even really conscious of having doing so until he hears her sigh.

 

“I told you Scully, we’ve never had the same auditive hallucinations at the same time before. It  _ had _ to mean something.”

 

If this is really them, if they are still together after all this time, Jackson has made a lot of wrong assumptions along the years.

 

“Where are we going?” he asks. His voice sounds high pitched and a little frantic, yet it’s far calmer than how he feels.

 

“Wherever you’ll be safe,” she says like she has been ready to give him that answer for half a life.

 

“Are you guys, what, going to drop out everything and help me escape those douchebags forever?”

 

“Yes,” he says not skipping a beat and that shuts Jackson up for about fifty whole seconds.

 

“Are you two for real? You can’t do that! Who does that?”

 

The guy looks at him on the rearview mirror, smiles broadly and it reminds him of that feeling when the presence in the beach smiled.

 

“Well, we know where he gets all the scepticism from, Scully.”

 

She looks quickly at her partner and then proceeds to ignore him.

 

“Yes, we can do exactly that,” she answers him instead. “We have prepared ourselves for what might come for a long time,” she says in a conciliatory tone.

 

Jackson breathes deep. Once, twice. Tries to wrap his mind about what’s happening, what might happen from now on. These are his biological parents. He still doesn’t know their names.

 

“Why do you call her  _ Scully _ ?”

 

“We are not big on first names around here.” He then makes a face. 

 

Well, he has been giving so many fake first names that he isn’t big on them either, and maybe these people think of him as William but he is not sure he is ready to be called solely that.

 

“I’m Mulder, by the way. You can be VK, short for Van de Kamp.”

 

Everything he is, everything he has is inside this car, with these strangers that aren’t quite totally strangers. VK seems fitting, like a new beginning that doesn’t forget the past. It feels like who he is deep inside.

 

“VK. Yes. I like that.”

 


	2. The utter importance of the journey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once more, with feeling and Mulder's POV. From the top.

She wakes up in the middle of the night with a start, and just by the way she gasps for air he knows she has been dreaming with him.

Mulder embraces her a little tighter, doesn’t even pretend that he hasn’t been awake for hours now. He tries to take in the sad hope contained in the air that has left her lungs and holds onto it like a lifeline. When it concerns their son, this is all that he gets and he accepts it, although it has always hurt like a burning iron branding his soul.

He buries his nose in the hair behind her ear and inhales deeply. If he ever took for granted the privilege of smelling her hair late at night, when only traces of her coconut shampoo remain, he is not foolish enough to do it now.

“Are you okay?” he murmurs against the soft skin of her nape.

She nods and he takes as a personal victory every single time that she doesn’t answers that question with a tried “I’m fine.” If nothing else, the years spent together have worn her barriers down enough for her to be raw honest with him.

“Do you think he’ll be okay?” her voice is raspy. It’s the same tone in which she has confessed all her sins to him. “He’s only a teenager.”

“He’s a very resourceful one.”

She breathes deeply and closes her eyes again. He hands go to his arm around her waist, the fingers of one of her hands entangling with his as she tries to go back to sleep.

Mulder relaxes his posture against her on the bed but doesn’t tries to go back to sleep. This is what he hasn’t told anyone: when it comes to his son, the hole within himself is so encompassing that he is rendered to inaction, can’t think, can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t barely breathe.

He closes his eyes and searches for that place in his mind, that beach where he saw him once, or maybe the idea of him, and waits — waits till the sun is up and Scully stirs in his arms and he can put that place in the back of his mind in favour of making breakfast.

She raids the Ghouli blog. 

Most evenings he comes back from the running trail to find her dog in his yard and her sitting on his couch with the laptop over her legs, avidly scrolling down the screen.

She must have read all the content twice by now but he doesn’t comment on it, doesn’t even have the heart to tease her about reading fanfiction because God knows he has read all that there is in that blog too. Not in search of clues of where he might be but looking for traits of who this boy is.

Mulder knows where his own genes come from, he is not taking from granted that this kid is a good person although — God, he wants to believe.

“Vegetarian lasagna for dinner?” he asks as he opens the fridge, crossing his mental fingers that he hasn’t assumed too much.

“Okay,” she says absentmindedly as she keeps reading.

She stays most nights these days, because he has a yard for the dog and she doesn’t, she said once. Mulder suspects that she doesn’t want be alone, not while she searches for their son in his words. She was alone when she gave him up.

It has taken a long time for her to forgive herself for that.

Mulder hasn’t been able to forgive himself yet.

He cooks lasagna and plays it light, cool, easy for her, because she carries so much pain in her sleeve that he couldn't possibly add his to the equation, and when she falls asleep he tries to follow her, to follow them wherever they are going.

As always.

When the postcard arrives time seems to stop for the time it takes Scully to breath again. It doesn’t say anything, doesn’t give them much information aside than he’s alive and well and knows how to contact them — which is a lot really.

Scully holds onto this postcard as he holds onto the air she moves when she walks around. She puts it safely in the pocket of her tablet case and does’t ever occur to her that he might want to hold onto it too.

It’s not like he claims to have any right but he has been mourning the lost of their child for as long as she has. The lost of that life, the lost of that piece of soul that parted when it all happened, and they both made choices that back then seemed as the only options.

She had said, “my child” in reference to William a handful of times along the years and since the first time he heard it, he knew it to be the claim that it was. Two “you weren’t there, Mulder,” a complete set of five “I was his mother and I failed him”. Scully made the pain for the loss of their son her prerogative and Mulder complied, silently, hurting alone in the dark back alley of his mind and not being able to stop, not even when it consumed him so much that she left him.

“I dreamed with him last night,” she says.

He knows, he always knows. Mulder once wondered how it is that she can communicate with the kid when he is the one with the abnormal brain activity history, the one with the open mind and open beliefs and a voice that sounded like the Scully of his mind answered that the only logical conclusion was that his son didn’t want to try to communicate with him.

Easy and simple.

He swallows the bitter realization and smiles back at Scully for a second before focusing back on the road ahead.

“Do you think we could recognize him if we crossed paths with him again now?”

“If in doubt we can always set off a fire alarm,” he says lightly.

“Urg, Mulder. Don’t.”

She looks out of her window. She doesn’t like to be reminded of Modell. She once told him that the easiness in which he had pulled the trigger against his own temple was one of her recurring nightmares.

He sighs.

“I think it’s not as easy to trick someone who is aware of the trick,” he concedes.

“Right.”

She seems appeased and he envies her that. If they want him they won’t stop till they get him, Mulder knows this better than most.

So this is what he does: he withdraws small amounts of money in random patterns and puts them in a metallic box underneath one of the floorboards in his room, He retrieves old fake IDs from where they were hidden: his old fake passport and Scully’s too and puts them in the same box. He works on maps on his spare time, locating safe houses, people that would help them if the worst came to be. A couple of guns. Ammunition. He slowly replicates the sports bag Scully used to carry around with anything and everything that could be needed at a medical emergency. Batteries. Lots and lots of batteries.

He’s good at this. He spent the better part of a decade preparing for the Apocalypse.

He doesn’t tell Scully because there’s nothing to tell, really. No specific plan, no timeline, this is just insurance and he has the feeling that talking about this would put a very big elephant right in the middle of the room. The last time they did this nothing came of it, and he had to watch how the possibility that she had given up their child for nothing ate her alive until she almost hit rock bottom, until she managed to barely crawl on her hands and knees and got a job at a children hospital just to try to get by.

He struggles thinking of what to do with Magoo if they have to run in the middle of the night as the dog distantly barks at some poor wild living creature.

 

Scully doesn’t like to run, although she does it from time to time so he isn’t entirely surprised when she comes down in her running shoes and her hair in a ponytail.

“I’m going to regret this later,” she announces as she zips up her sports jacket. It’s early and it’s cold outside.

“That is what you always say to me, Scully.”

She snorts and hits him affectionately on the arm as she passes him by.

They run the trail in silence, there is only the sound of their breathing and their feet hitting the ground and Mulder’s mind empties, goes to that imaginary place on that beach where he is permanently waiting, hoping for a better outcome, a happy ending.

“He will turn seventeen tomorrow,” he says as the trail finishes and they slow down. “We never got to celebrate any of his birthdays.”

He doesn’t know why he says it. It’s not like Scully doesn’t know this and it breaks the rules of the tacit agreement in which he is not to lean on Scully for this kind of stuff. Ever.

He shrugs it off, as if it had only been a stupid thought.

She surprises him. She sighs and takes his hand in hers as they slowly walk back to the house.

“The clauses of the _birthday special_ specifies that it has to be _your_ birthday, but maybe we can make an exception. To celebrate,” she says lightly, lifting the mood up with an almost smile.

This birthday special includes take out dinner on the couch, watching Forbidden Planet and sex, so he’s not going to turn that one down. He hadn’t realized it included some soul mending too.

He kind of dreams with him that night. He’s not sure if it’s a dream because he’s not sure he’s asleep and they are at his place on the beach.

“I think I know who you are,” the boy says sitting on imaginary sand next to him.

 _I am your father_ , crosses his mind but it would be wrong on so many levels that he simply takes a deep breath.

“Sometimes I think I know who I am too.” It’s the closest to the truth anyway.

The boy looks around as if he can’t quite believe it himself.

“So you are here,” he says to him.

“I’ve always been here. Waiting.”

They talk a little, with long pauses between sentences that fill with the sound of waves crashing on the sand. Old age has made him this kind of patient, or maybe it has been the waiting what has made him patient, who knows.

“She said she named me William after, you father.”

Mulder smiles and looks at him, at this boy who was once briefly his. He put him on his naked chest and tried to comfort him with the sound of his heartbeat while Scully showered. Nothing ever before had fitted quite like him over his heart. Nothing since has.

“It is almost an inside joke,” he tells him. “It was also her father’s name.”

“Oh.”

Mulder doesn’t want to pressure him, doesn’t want to rush into questions or explanations. Now that he has reached for him he feels like there will be time for that. To this kid he is a perfect stranger even if Mulder has had him in his mind every single day of his life.

“Are you safe?” he asks him though. His voice sounds worried in a cautious way. If he had ever thought he could just this easily sound like a father he would have discarded the idea as ridiculous.

“Yes.” And there is so much pride, certainty and sad knowledge contained in that word that Mulder believes him, without a trace of doubt.

Scully finds his copy of baby William’s picture. To be fair is not such a difficult task, it’s in the third drawer of the kitchen with the kitchenware they never use.

She takes the pictures in her hands and follows with her fingers the blunt borders before looking at him. He knows what she sees in it. That it has been touched often, that it has been with him all this time.

“Oh, Mulder,” she says. “Why didn’t you talk to me?”

Because the fear that his pain combined with hers would break them both in a million of tiny pieces had been too great.

“It’s okay,” he says instead.

“No.” Scully says ‘no’ more now on any given day that she ever did in their first years as partners. “No, it’s not. But it will.”

She puts her arms around his waist and goes on tiptoes to kiss him softly on the lips.

It’s Sunday, so Scully sleeps in and Mulder tries to make as little noise as possible while he prepares some breakfast. He’s only wearing a wife beater, his boxers and some tennis socks when the door opens and he almost, almost throws the frying pan to the intruder before recognizing him.

“Where is Scully? We need to go now.”

“You could have knocked, you know?”

“Yeah, but then I would have missed all the fun of watching you in underwear and socks armed with a frying pan.”

“You are an asshole, Spender,” he says, but he is already taking the stairs two steps at a time to get Scully.

“I guess it runs on the family. Brother.”

They head to Atlantic City. The car filled with the provisions he had been storing for a while plus some clothes, and they leave Dagoo more or less secured in Spender’s arms.

“We are not going back.”

It’s not a question, it’s not a realization. It is a statement. Scully reaches to caress his hair behind his ear in a rare display of affection.

“No, we’re not.”

They left him once, for his own good. Neither of them are going to do it again and they both know it, even if that means leaving everything else behind, even if that means dying trying.

“How will we know it’s him.”

“We’ll know, Scully.”

This is the sum of all their arguments, a reasonable doubt versus unfaltering faith.

They arrive to the place Spender has told them about and keep going when they see all the dark cars with tinted windows parked on the street, which is a relief because that means that they haven’t gotten to him yet but it also makes it all a little more difficult.

“What do we do now, Mulder?”

He turns on the next street and then turns again until they are in the next parallel street, then he stops the car.

“I think he is in the coffee shop.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s where we would be if we could do what he can do and he’s a smart boy.”

She thinks about it for half a second before she lets herself get convinced by his words like she does sometimes.

“Okay, you go,” she says. “I draw more attention. I’ll keep the engine running. Go.”

He nods once and gets out of the car. Mulder knows this is really difficult for her. When it comes to William she feels like she’s the one that has to make amends.

He goes back to the street where the main entrance to coffee shop is and enters like his only aim in life is to have a complicated cappuccino. He places his order and puts his hands on his front trousers, looking around distractedly as if he weren’t scanning the room.

He dismisses the people who are in groups and is left with a twentysomething blonde that exudes too much confidence and draws too much attention and an elderly man doing a crossword with a juvenile backpack.

He’s about to approach him when the image glitches and for an instant he can see the lanky boy he’s looking for. He gets his coffee, stills his nerves and goes to sit next to him.

“I think I know who you are,” he says playfully, hoping that the sentence he once said at him resonates with the boy enough to get his attention.

He looks at him with old man eyes but deep within, if he looks intently, Mulder can recognize a flicker of something familiar in them. 

He’s far easier to convince than he would have though. This kid doesn’t know them, not really and he’s offering him nothing more than a escape route.

The make it to the car and out of Atlantic City without much trouble. Mulder knows it won't always be this easy but he will count his blessing whenever he can.

It’s almost two in the morning when they stop at an old, 24 hours open dinner by the road. No CCTV cameras on sight and they order a couple of pieces of the house cake and three coffees.

“So, what’s the plan? You are FBI agents or something like that, right?”

Mulder and Scully look briefly at each other. “Yeah, something like that,” Scully confirms.

He nods once, twice, unconvinced, before he puts another giant piece of cake in his mouth.

“I’m trying to decide if that’s cool or the embodiment of the Government disrespect of individual’s rights,” he says.

Mulder has to bite his tongue not to say anything about Government conspiracies, but Scully kicks him lightly under the table anyway for good measure.

“If I have any say on the matter I’ve always wanted to be cool,” Mulder says.

The kid looks at him with an almost smile that grips his heart in the resemblance with his own. “We’ll see about that.”

When he gets up to go to the bathroom Scully takes a couple of deep, steading breaths.

“What?” he asks her. He knows what that kind of breath means.

“I’m just scared Mulder. He is here, with us.” Her voice breaks a little. “And we’re not the kind of people that get happy endings, Mulder.”

Not they are not. In his mind, there is no ending to who they are together. 

He reaches to caress the side of her face and she leans on the touch.

“It was never about it ending Scully.” He leans on until his forehead touches hers. “It’s all about the journey.”

He kisses her chastely but with all the love that he knows. Before their son comes back from the bathroom, she is already unfolding a map.

**Author's Note:**

> I REALLY should be studying for my finals.
> 
> ::sigh::


End file.
